100 Theory,Culture Society job,for instance,are not blamed on those whose health they have already ruined anyway,but are stripped of their individual origin and related instead to the plant organization,the lack of precautions and so on. A second advantage is closely connected to the first:insurance payments are agreed on and guaranteed on a no-fault basis(setting aside the extreme cases of gross negligence or intentional damage). In that way,legal battles over causation become unnecessary and moral outrage is moderated.Instead,an incentive for prevention is created for businesses,in proportion to the magnitude of the insurance costs -or perhaps not. The decisive thing,however,is ultimately that in this manner the industrial system is made capable of dealing with its own unfore- seeable future.The calculus of risks,protection by insurance liability laws and the like promise the impossible:events that have not yet occurred become the object of current action-prevention, compensation or precautionary after-care.As the French sociologist Francois Ewald (1986)shows in detailed studies,the 'invention'of the calculus of risks lies in making the incalculable calculable, with the help of accident statistics,through generalizable settlement formulae as well as through the generalized exchange principle of 'money for damages'.In this way,a norm system of rules for social accountability,compensation and precautions,always very controversial in its details,creates present security in the face of an open uncertain future.Modernity,which brings uncertainty to every niche of existence,finds its counter-principle in a social com- pact against industrially produced hazards and damages,stitched together out of public and private insurance agreements. Politically and programmatically,this pact for the containment and 'just'distribution of the consequences of the standard industrial revolution is situated somewhere between socialism and liberalism, because it is based on the systematic creation of consequences and hazards,but at the same time involves individuals in preventing and compensating for them.The consensus that can be achieved with it always remains unstable,conflict-laden and in need of revi- sion.For that very reason,however,it represents the core,the inner 'social logic'of the consensus on progress,which-in principle- legitimated techno-economic development in the first phase of industrialism.Where this security pact'is violated wholesale, flagrantly and systematically,the consensus on progress itself is consequently at stake. Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on June 17.2012Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at Shanghai Jiaotong University on June 17, 2012